Tanzania’s Cardamom Buyers, Named: Inside a Volatile $3.68 Million Export Market

Cardamom.tz has already told the production side of this story: Tanzania was briefly the world’s third-largest cardamom producer in the 1970s, and today sits a distant eighth, exporting a fraction of a percent of what Guatemala or India grow. What that earlier piece didn’t have was a destination breakdown — who actually buys the cardamom Tanzania does export. UN Comtrade’s bilateral trade data answers that, in more detail than most Tanzanian export crops get.

Two buyers account for two-thirds of the market

In 2024, Tanzania exported 338.2 tonnes of whole cardamom (HS 090831) worth $3.67 million, plus a small additional 10 tonnes of ground cardamom to Jordan worth $10,150. Of the whole-cardamom total, the Netherlands alone bought $1.57 million (43%) and India bought $837,306 (23%) — together, 66% of everything Tanzania exported. The remainder is spread thin: Kuwait ($301,000), the UAE ($288,000), Germany ($192,000), Libya ($126,000), and smaller amounts to the UK, US, France, Jordan, Italy, Pakistan, Greece and Switzerland.

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“Gulf markets” is really Kuwait and the UAE — and Saudi Arabia is conspicuously absent

Tanzania’s cardamom does reach Gulf buyers, but specifically Kuwait and the UAE, together just 16% of export value. Saudi Arabia — the single largest cardamom importer in the world, buying roughly a quarter of all cardamom traded globally — does not appear anywhere in Tanzania’s 2024 bilateral export data. That’s not a data gap on our end; it’s an absence in Tanzania’s actual trade pattern. Whether that reflects a real market-access gap or simply means Tanzanian cardamom reaches Saudi buyers indirectly (via India or the UAE, for instance, then re-exported) isn’t something trade data alone can answer.

A volatile market, not a steady one

Export value swung from $1.21 million (2021) to $1.71 million (2022) down to $569,000 (2023) and back up to $3.68 million (2024) — a 556% jump in a single year. A market this size moves on a handful of large shipments, not a stable trend line, and any year-on-year comparison should be read with that in mind.

A caveat worth stating plainly

Every one of these figures is marked in UN Comtrade’s own data as a partner-reported mirror estimate, not a Tanzanian customs declaration — Tanzania itself has not self-reported cardamom trade to Comtrade in any of the last four years on file. The numbers above are built from what importing countries declared they received from Tanzania, which is a legitimate and commonly-used substitute, but it is not the same thing as Tanzania’s own export records.

See Cardamom.tz’s production history for how this export market compares to Tanzania’s modest and well-documented production scale.